


Gathering the Honey

by what_alchemy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence - The Reichenbach Fall, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Retirement, g-rated other than the swearing, long separation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 12:23:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17080271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: Hope bears Sherlock to John's door, twenty-five years after the fall.





	Gathering the Honey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fandomlucky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomlucky/gifts).



> For FandomLucky, who wanted retirement fic. It's never the wrong time for retirement fic!

The texts came whilst Sherlock was tending the bees.

He’s divorced now.  
-MH

He initiated.  
-MH

Twenty-five years ago, Sherlock might have done something grand and elaborate. A disguise, perhaps. A waiter, a beggar, a candlestick maker. He did so love drama. But now. Now. What was left, but to go to John?

 

 

It was a lovely little cottage with a garden, nestled in amongst all the other lovely little cottages in the village. Some suburb of Edinburgh, name deleted long ago like so much detritus. Sherlock had scouted it when he first returned to Britain and he’d never forgotten the house, the way through the streets, the carefully cultivated spill of the wildflowers out front. Hateful, he’d thought then, boring and hateful and so unlike John who was glorious dangerous fun. But before Sherlock could abandon his surveillance and set a plan in motion, John had come out of that lovely little cottage, a curly-haired little girl in his arms chattering away in his ear as John laughed. Sherlock couldn’t bring himself to leave his car. He knew in that moment that he couldn’t bring himself back to life, either. He had Mycroft pull the trigger on a new identity, and he went about building a quieter life for himself.

Twenty-five years. Same house. More ivy.

John opened the door with a wooden smile on his face, the one reserved for salesmen and proselytizers. His hair had gone all white and he had jowls and extra pudge around his belly, but his eyes were just the same. Storm blue and glinting. 

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Sherlock’s throat was dry, his lips gummed together. He coughed and shifted from foot to foot.

“John,” he said, and his voice came like a croak.

“Yes?”

“Erm.”

“Look mate, I’m not really interested in the good news or what have you, so we can just skip the pleasantries and be on our way, yeah?”

“John, it’s me.”

John’s jaw clicked shut. Sherlock wondered what he saw as he peered up at him, eyes narrowing into suspicious little slits. Sherlock’s hair at nearly sixty was salt and pepper and more closely cropped than he would ever have worn it in his youth, but it still boasted curls. His face was lined but he had stayed trim. It was too warm yet for the fourth iteration of his old Belstaff, but he did come in a bespoke charcoal suit that emphasized his long legs and slim hips.

“No,” John said, and closed the door.

Sherlock stood before it for a moment, unmoving and unseeing. He would not recall, later, what color it was or what kind of wood it was made of. He turned around. Bright spots of pink and purple punctuated the garden. The high sun sent the dappling shadows of leaves and blossoms across the cobblestone. An ancient car lumbered down the way. Birds called and answered their tuneless chittering. Sherlock blinked rapidly before taking a staggering step down the walk, and then another, and another.

“Oi!” John called from behind him. “You come back here, you arsehole!”

Sherlock lurched around and found John red-faced and scowling in the doorway. Numbly Sherlock followed him over the threshold, shutting the door behind him as John stomped off. Inside was bright with natural light but tidy and drab, all oatmeal and navy, hardwood and stone, the only points of color the occasional wall art made by children. His own, or his grandchildren? Did he have grandchildren? That information was not filed away; an egregious oversight. Sherlock cast about for evidence: no crayons, no toys on the floor, no cartoon characters on plates or stickers or devices. Either there were no grandchildren, or they didn’t visit often enough to keep their things out.

John had led him to the kitchen, where he pointed aggressively at a chair until Sherlock sat, and then John set about making tea. The kettle and the mugs and the spoons and the sugar bowl all came down with far greater force than seemed necessary. 

“Well?” John said as he plonked the steaming mug down before Sherlock. The slosh of the tea narrowly missed his hand.

“It’s a bit of a long story,” Sherlock said.

“Twenty-five years long, I imagine!” John said. He leaned his hands on the table and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and held it in his lungs.

“Yes,” Sherlock said.

“What the fuck, Sherlock.”

“Where shall I start then?”

John made a strange choking sound, sort of halfway between a giggle and a roar. 

“Start with why the _fuck_ you didn’t tell me you were alive.”

Sherlock looked out the window. Outside stretched rows of stone walls, gardens, houses. Clothes lines. He tried to grasp at the urgency of his long-ago life, but there was nothing left.

“It seemed the right idea at the time,” he said. “To keep you safe whilst I dismantled Moriarty’s web. Now though—it’s hard to say. All those reasons that seemed so sure are just—” He waved a hand. “—gossamer and smoke.”

John sank into the chair opposite him, and when Sherlock pulled his attention back, John’s shoulders had slumped, and the lines in his face appeared to have grown deeper. 

“And when did you come back?” John’s voice had gone gruff.

“About five years after I’d gone,” Sherlock said. He sat up tall and square. “I came straight away, John. You should know. I came to fetch you.”

A muscle ticked in John’s jaw.

“What?” he whispered.

“Mycroft had kept up his…detail on you—”

“Mycroft!” John barked with laughter. “I’d forgotten about that tosser.”

“For which I’m terribly envious of you, I do assure you,” Sherlock said. “Anyway, he knew where you’d gone so I got on the next train north. Did you know when you come out of Waverly there’s just a bloody great castle right there?”

“Sherlock.”

“And then I hired a car and I was watching this house, planning my grand reveal, but then.”

“But then…”

“You came out. With Daphne. She was making you laugh.”

John curled his hands around his mug. He stared for a long time.

“You should have told me.”

“Probably,” Sherlock said. “But I didn’t know I how temper myself at the time. Back then there could be no space between ‘bring him back to London with a gun in his hand’ and ‘let him alone forever.’”

“And now?” John asked.

“I’ve retired,” Sherlock said. “There’s very little use for guns.”

John cracked a smile then, only on one side and involuntarily at that, but it was a real smile. 

“You shithead,” he said.

Sherlock smiled.

“What about you, John?” he asked. “What have you been getting up to in the bloody suburbs, of all places?”

“Don’t you know?” John said. “Did you lose your deducing muscle on the train?”

“I’d like to hear what you have to say about it all.”

“A circumspect and reasonable answer,” John said. “My God. Twenty-five years.”

“I do despair of my vanity, John.” Sherlock touched his hair, and John laughed.

“I got a position at a clinic in Edinburgh,” he said, condensing the syllables of the city until it sounded like “Embruh.” “Good hours, good pay. I met Phaedra, who was an archivist from Greece, hence the name, and our kids’ names. Daphne and Silas. They’re in Edinburgh and Glasgow respectively. Daph’s studying medicine, wants to be a medical examiner, and Silas is about to graduate with a degree in graphic design, the poor skint bugger. That’s about it, I suppose.”

“No grandchildren,” Sherlock said. 

John’s face twisted up as if Sherlock had told him there were four-day-old ears in the fridge.

“Hardly,” he said. “Daphne’s not yet twenty-three, you know.”

“Some people wish to be young parents,” Sherlock said. “And there’s always the classic option of birth control failure.”

“Silas is gay so there will be no accidents on that front, thank you very much,” John said. “And Daph’s a bit…well. Head stuck so far in a book, I’m not sure if other people even register to her. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she were yours.”

“Oh, is she also gay?”

John’s mouth guppied for a moment before clacking shut again.

“I don’t know, actually,” he said faintly. “Guess I never bothered to ask.”

Sherlock hummed and took a sip of his tea. Builder’s with a lot of sugar. Just how he had always liked it. 

“And were you waiting for them to be established on their own before leaving Phaedra?”

“Sorry, just—are you?” he asked. “Gay?”

“I thought it was fairly obvious John.”

“Nope!” 

“What, should I have shouted it from the rooftops? Worn more rainbow? I am many things, John, but gauche is not one of them.” Sherlock tilted his chin up.

John and that bark of laughter again.

“No, of course not,” he said. “But you never brought anyone home. You never even seemed to notice anyone.”

It was Sherlock’s turn to stare. Those eyes. That nose. That silly pursing mouth. Just the same, after all this time.

“Oh?” he said. “And here I thought I’d been so embarrassingly obvious.”

John sat back and Sherlock watched all manner of complicated, unknowable emotions flit across his face.

“Ah,” he said at last. “Well. Maybe.”

“ _Maybe_?”

“I was a bit of an arse, I’m afraid.”

It was Sherlock’s turn to laugh.

“Yes, I think you were very carefully not noticing who I was—” Sherlock’s breath left him before he could finish, and his mouth closed of its own accord.

“I was still afraid, back then,” John said. “Of what it meant on my end. I’m sorry about that.”

“I’m sorry too,” Sherlock said. “About—everything.”

John inhaled deeply and nodded. 

“So,” he said. “Why now? After so long?”

“I’d heard you'd divorced,” Sherlock said.

“Mycroft?”

Sherlock inclined his head; John shook his.

“Obvious,” John said. 

“And I thought, maybe,” Sherlock said.

“Maybe?”

“Maybe you’d like to come look at my bees.”

John leaned back and planted his elbow on his armrest, his cheek in his palm. He looked how he looked when Sherlock loved him most fiercely: amazed and affectionate and appalled all at once.

“Is that some shocking euphemism I’m going to have to text poor Silas about?”

“When I left London,” Sherlock said, “I bought a honey bee farm in Sussex Downs. They’re very good company, bees. You can tell them anything and they don’t think you’re odd. Also, there’s a dog.”

“A dog.”

“Yes, John, a dog,” Sherlock said. “Do keep up.”

“Is this dog yours, or is does it wander around the beehives, friendless and alone, waiting to get stung?”

“He’s my dog of course,” Sherlock said. “He’s some kind of terrier named Huckleberry, and he’s very smart, John. He knows not to harass the bees.”

“Ah.”

“Did you _want_ beekeeping to be a shocking euphemism? I wonder what it would be.” 

“Gathering the honey?” John’s eyebrows bounced once. “Smoking the bees out? Taming the queen?” 

“Those just sound like more euphemisms.”

“Sherlock.” John reached a hand out and locked onto Sherlock’s wrist. His eyes were bright. “I’m not…”

“Gay,” Sherlock said. “I know.” He pressed his lips together. 

John’s smile was rueful.

“No,” he said. “I’m not gay. But, maybe, perhaps, I’m a little bit bisexual. And not ready, right this second, to be making all manner of new euphemisms with someone I thought dead these last two and a half decades.”

There. A conversational space, a bit of damnable hope lobbed at him like a bomb. It lit up the spark in Sherlock’s heart, the thing that had carried him all the way to a quiet village in Scotland.

“But,” he said.

“But,” John said, a challenge in his eyes. “I have a guest room, a twenty year old Glenfiddich, and all the time in the world to hear about what you’ve been getting up to since scraping yourself up off that pavement.”

Sherlock flipped his wrist over, and John’s palm slid into his, fingers slotting just so against his own. 

 

**End**


End file.
